were worse,
You're just not gonna budge it doesn't matter believe what you want. Thousands of queers were imprisoned. Millions lost their cultural and religious identity. The Soviet Union did not have favorable trade deals, they had full scale occupations. We can sit here all day and say who was worse but the bigger thing is NOBODY WAS SAFE so it's completely irrelevant it isn't even a light slap vs a death penalty, it is straight up government-funded harassment campaigns everywhere. There is no "lax" when it comes to government repression dude.
And then you look at today and the West has absolutely come out far ahead for the LGBTQIA+ community by a long shot because it actually was better in the West.
As for comparing post-socialist countries to contemporary capitalist countries, you are not making an honest comparison of socialism to capitalism.
I don't have to because fortunately human rights don't apply directly to those structures, they're different across each nation that embraces those ideals. Socialists governments want to pretend they champion for human rights but they don't if anyone is oppressed, they're just choosing which demographics to support which is exactly how the rest of the world does it too. You're being completely disingenuous trying to frame it as a this or that argument, there are not two sides to human rights.
But you're not interested in being fair, you just want the soviet union to be some rainbow paradise or something when it was not. It constricted so hard on the queer community that the identity was completely shadowed and still to this day is goes largely unidentified and unrecorded except for a few like Gennady Trifonov who barely managed to get his story out. Whatever man.